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Will Harris Try To Sell Voters On The Idea She Is Tough On Crime?

Vice President Harris is a “cop.” That’s how the progressive left attacked her the last time she ran for president. It’s also what might help her win this time, writes Washington Post columnist Catherine Rampell. Republicans have suggested that Harris is poised to become the Democratic Party’s nominee solely because she must be a “DEI” or affirmative action case. Demographics aside, her professional CV is unusually well suited to the moment in one way: She’s credibly tough on crime, which is among both voters’ top concerns and Democrats’ biggest vulnerabilities. Harris began her career in the Alameda County, Ca., prosecutor’s office pursuing child abusers and sex traffickers. In a less partisan world, those legions of QAnoners who profess concern over sex-trafficked kids would back her rather than Donald Trump, who palled around with Jeffrey Epstein.


As district attorney of San Francisco and eventually California’s attorney general, Harris spoke often about criminal justice reform and her place in it, as the member of a population historically mistreated by law enforcement. Her actual positions were relatively nuanced, and often centered on victims of crime rather than alleged perpetrators. This sometimes put her at odds with a far left that would later become synonymous with calls to defund the police. More controversially, Harris threatened criminal charges against the parents of chronically truant students, citing a connection between missing class and subsequent lawbreaking.

Meanwhile, Harris’s rhetoric sometimes needled progressives, too. At a 2013 event, she gently chided slogans to “build more schools, less jails.” “I agree with that conceptually, but you have not addressed the reason I have three padlocks on my front door,” she said. “Part of the discussion about reform of criminal justice policy has to be an acknowledgment that crime does occur. And especially when it is violent crime and serious crime, there should be a broad consensus that there should be serious and severe and swift consequence to crime.”

Voters believe Harris would do a worse job tackling crime than Trump would, per a YouGov poll conducted just before Biden announced his exit from the race, despite their records. Harris’s challenge now is to demonstrate she’s not only tougher on crime but a great saleswoman of that toughness, too, Rampell writes.

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A daily report co-sponsored by Arizona State University, Criminal Justice Journalists, and the National Criminal Justice Association

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